Taking out the Trash

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On parliament's last day before its summer break, the British government publicly released thirty ministerial statements, including one listing the salaries of "special advisers," one detailing the siting criteria for new nuclear power stations and another detailing the guests entertained at Prime Minister Gordon Brown's official residence, Chequers. The document dump was dubbed by some as "take out the trash day," after an episode of the fictional television series on the White House, the West Wing. Mike Granatt, a former head of the British government's Government Information and Communications Service and now a partner in the PR firm Luther Pendragon, explained to PR Week, "You shove everything out on one day and you hope the volume of it means there's only a certain amount of room in the papers and on TV and radio, so that squeezes it. And, secondly, you take the hit at once."